And so I rejoin (redux)

Rejoining the unemployed.

Well thankfully not properly, but let's just say that wasn't my thing.

Yeah it ticked the 'Hey let's do something in video games' box. And the 'let's get out of this job' box too. But it didn't tick the 'Am i enjoying life' box.

Great respect to those guys that I worked with. People are driven by different things and that wasn't the way I wanted to live and it was a little too easy/mindless. I also spoke with tons of people I hugely respect and strengthened my technical knowledge. Understood the industry a little better.

So cracking on with the C++ and firming up my portfolio. Just cool stuff, as you do.

Back to the subject at hand, and why anyone might read this blog soon. I have been playing games, as you'd expect! Dragon's Dogma might deserve some attention. I'll try draft something out, in my plentiful downtime!

Kyle

And so I rejoin.

The thing is, I may have found a job on the periphery of the games industry, but am I happy?

Well the answer actually is yes.

I have an excuse to read NeoGAF at work.

But more importantly I am learning new corners of the industry. Exciting corners. The kind of corners Valve are shouting about, by giving their freelance economist his own blog. I know that's actually old news, and he might have been fired along with Jeri. But it's also brand new.

So while looking for lead artists for studio X, I am also looking for business intelligence managers. I am looking for lifecycle managers. People who are looking at the future of the commercial side of games. People who are identifying ways to monetise user interaction.

And it's intriguing stuff. It's a frontier.

Should have more soon. Also I am playing Antichamber. Should write about that.

Hiatus

  I have been gone for quite a while. In this time the regularity with which I played videogames waned. I cancelled my LOVEFiLM subscription, met someone and devoted a lot of time to working.

  I write this in fear, because my favourite experiences exist in superb 3D artistry and complex programming (to simplify AAA videogame development into two categories) . Mechanics, imagery and characters I'll remember forever - because they required an investment of time on the sofa with a specific piece of hardware, and a wad of cash to even purchase. They were played in solitude, and asked that I endured a couple hours training before I could fully play.

  Nowadays I find myself playing smart phone games. Mechanically, they are quite entertaining. And every now and then, I find a genius little time whittler. These few games I will instinctively compare to Tetris. Not for any ludo-sensical reason, just as a reaction to them being based on one simple, yet satisfying mechanic.

  These games tend to be played in the time between real life, and they fit nicely there. Because of that, they are not events, nor do they carry any meaning. They aren't played in solitude thanks to Facebook. As aforementioned, they exist with one mechanic and require seconds to grasp. They are small, never breathtakingly pretty and have very short, looping soundtracks.

So why, if there is no clear winner am I fearful?

Despite having spent £40 this year on the AAA games, and £0 on the smartphone games, I have spent hours more on the latter. And I'd assume the industry is paying attention to that little bit of less-than-anecdotal evidence.

More than that this blog post is probably about missing a big AAA game, hopefully as the summer draws to a close, and more time is spent inside, I'll see something that piques my interest.

Hope to post more soon.

Kyle

Irregularly posted notes continued...

Since last time I posted I have got a LoveFilm account. Exciting!

Anyway it's given me the opportunity to play tens of triple A production standard games. Far Cry 2, Mafia II, Portal 2, Batman Arkham Asylum, both Modern Warfares, Bioshock, Assassins Creed 2 and Brotherhood.

What has this made me realise?

Quite how infatuated I am with story. And how absolutely natural and acceptable that is. It's also given me the opportunity to experience the games that are getting most proficient at moulding the mechanic side, to the suit the characters, events and setting of the experience.

I am incredibly optimistic regarding the state of videogames. It's a difficult time, regarding the best way to reach the audience, but it's a booming industry in terms of creativity. When I play through the cross section of games I mentioned in addition to less stellar creations, there is admittedly more homogeny than 8 or 9 years ago but the experiences are also consistently more honed.

I feel the next big step for developers is finding an original story to tell, while we get the odd one; the original Portal being a superb example, the slice I mentioned is populated with mimmicks of popular cinematic or novel narratives.

This is hardly insightful I know, but I can't keep posting those things so irregularly. Have a laptop now, lets see if this blog will be easier to sustain if I have my means of notation with me as I play.

Player Agency

It's been a while. Sorry.

Basically I was reading a superb piece of 'videogame journalism' on 1UP of all places, given the dirge of talent there since the UGO hit the fan. It was an investigative piece on LMNO, EA's Steven Spielberg game.

There was lots of conceptual things being thrown around. Short game experiences, replayability, the endurance of mechanics particularly caught my eye.

We talk a lot about player agency, and interactivity being the pinnacle of this medium. And how it will only be truly embraced, when creators within the medium allow the players more control - making decisions and procedural reactions.

But I just find it difficult to comprehend in a a world where we celebrate the creators i.e celebrities, that the artist - as it were - behind the media we consume is not more important than the media itself. That's a complete exaggeration actually, we always resonate with the media ultimately, but the craft, the design, the execution, it's all stuff we revel in, and it's all down to the people who make it.

I don't actually mind either way, but if I were to make one bold opinion clear on this subject, it'd be that for the future of videogames to remain interesting on a cogniscent level, the thing we need to learn is not to copy from film or novels, certainly not in terms of narrative execution. If player agency is going to important, it will be all down to the characters that we find in the game. Characters are all that matter in games.

Those or they will be the crafted elements that remain. They will define your narrative, as long as they feel interesting. Like meeting someone with an interesting story at a bus-stop or getting an opportunity to ask about your work colleague's past, or your peremptory boss, or the unassuming cleaner.

I'm sorry this post was so illegible. It just all needed to come out.

I'm from a family with a culture of overzealous post-war thrift, I'd prefer the words are here to be fiddled with for a special occasion or recycled in some thought process, even if it's only decipherable to me at the moment. Thanks for trying to understand.

Ludo-Narrative dissonance *BUZZ*

I've read about this buzzowrd, and thought i understood it perfectly.

It's when you're in a happy game like Uncharted, and you're killing 800 people. The actions don't ring true with the character. That IS the dissonance, right?

Without jumping on anyone who reads this with a "WRONG!", that my lame rhetoric perfectly set up, I personally hadn't considered that is may only be circumstancial dissonance. I haven't thought, or read about the intrinsic dissonance between narrative and ludic. It may appear obvious, what I am talking about: the idea that they are so seperate, and we have a hard time incorporating them, sans cutscenes and clumsy interfaces.

In most mediums, narrative has naturally been the thing that catches the mainstream audience attention. We like to hear about stories. We like to hear about fantastic or unexpected events, and the way people react to them. The action and explosions are technically limited on the big screen. Poetic writing can embellish a novel, but it requires a story.

Perhaps games are most similar to music, where we've pretty much established that beat and tone comes before a story. Lyrics can work, as can game stories, but they can also be implemented clumsily, and can often feel unecessary. And the phonetically, the two are in conflict.

In much the same way, story as we know it, is about events that are not mundane. Games are much more about mechanics and ACTIONS that are not mundane, because while we lack the ability to direct a story in games, we have the ability to apply the mechanics, that are the draw of the game.

The reason games can't tell stories like movies, is the same reason movies can't be like our lives.

Our lives are too mundane to be movies, and the actions in movies, while less mundane, in events, are often very mundane in terms of interaction.

These mundanities (is that a word) can be transported into a game world, only when the player sees fit, not when it suits the story.

Revision of Thoughts.

Almost two months later I come back to conclude what I started.

What do we STRIVE for during play? For each individual it changes. Some a completionist, obsessive compulsion, some an experienced, story based drive. But something as humans we all recognise, is that we don't actually strive for success and it's benefits exclusively, we strive for the recognition of our actions - whether it's success, failure or the grey area inbetween.

We complete the game, so we can say we've "one-hundred percented it". Or that we've "completed the story". We play multiplayer games, so that our achievement is shared by REAL people, not just a computer. And we love RPG ending sequences, becuase they have noted our actions.

For me personally, I play imagining I am demoing a game at E3. I try to make it look cool. I find enormous enjoyment, and frustration in that.

And while it's not for me to say what games SHOULD do, I think it's always healthy to note, that in any game design, there should be room for reciprocation of your actions. Multiplayer, co-op, Youtube capturing, live streaming, personalised endings. And to support those elements, the ability to express your actions. It's an important part of the interactive medium.